Free Republic

Venezuela is running out of just about everything. Food, medicine, electricity, toilet paper, condoms -- you name it. ( Full title ). And over the weekend at least two large international airlines -- Lufthansa and LATAM -- said they will suspend service to Venezuela in the coming months due to the economic crisis. The widespread scarcities and fleeing businesses reflect a country in crisis. "There's a shortage of everything at some level," says Ricardo Cusanno, vice president of Venezuela's Chamber of Commerce. Cusanno says 85% of companies in Venezuela have halted production to some extent. Venezuela's economy is spiraling into...

A new concept for a flow battery functions like an old hourglass or egg timer, with particles (in this case carried as a slurry) flowing through a narrow opening from one tank to another. The flow can then be reversed by turning the device over. Credit: Image courtesy of the researchers ================================================================================================================== A new approach to the design of a liquid battery, using a passive, gravity-fed arrangement similar to an old-fashioned hourglass, could offer great advantages due to the system's low cost and the simplicity of its design and operation, says a team of MIT researchers who have made a...

Inspired by the geniuses Nikola Tesla and Albert Einstein, teenager Max Loughan loves to invent things, in fact, he says he has known his entire short life that his purpose was to change the world with his inventions. And he may just do it. “As cheesy as this sounds, from day one, on this planet that I knew I was put here for a reason,” said Max. “And that reason is to invent, to bring the future.” Wearing a lab coat while speaking in a televised interview with KTVN Channel 2 in Reno and Tahoe, Nevada, Max explains the free...

A University of Texas at Dallas researcher has made a discovery that could open the door to cellphone and car batteries that last five times longer than current ones. Dr. Kyeongjae Cho, professor of materials science and engineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, has discovered new catalyst materials for lithium-air batteries that jumpstart efforts at expanding battery capacity. The research was published in Nature Energy. "There's huge promise in lithium-air batteries. However, despite the aggressive research being done by groups all over the world, those promises are not being delivered in real life," Cho said....

Oil and gas industry groups on Thursday sued federal agencies over revisions to land management plans in Colorado and other western states to protect the greater sage-grouse. The Western Energy Alliance and the North Dakota Petroleum Council filed the suit in North Dakota, saying the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service failed to follow proper procedures for public involvement in adopting the land use plan amendments. They also say the plans ignore sound science and will hurt western economies. Plan revisions being challenged include ones in northwest Colorado, where greater sage-grouse habitat substantially overlaps with oil and gas...

Hamas, which advocates jihad to destroy the State of Israel and calls to boycott the Jewish state, demanded a greater supply of electricity from Israel to Gaza on Sunday. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri charged the "Israeli occupation" with responsibility for a house fire "which burned to death this week three toddler members of the al-Hindi family in Gaza." The fire broke out due to the family lighting candles in their apartment, as their neighborhood had been suffering from a blackout at the time. Abu Zuhri also accused Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas and PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah...

Venezuela's government has said it will turn off electricity supply in its 10 most populous states for four hours a day for at least 40 days to deal with a severe power shortage.(Snip)Recently, the country's main brewery Polar, which is part of Venezuela's largest cooperative Empresas Polar, announced that it would stop production as a result of financial difficulties. The company, which produces 80 percent of the country's beer, says thousands of workers will lose their jobs as a result of the stoppage.

UCI chemist Reginald Penner (shown) and doctoral candidate Mya Le Thai have developed a nanowire-based technology that allows lithium-ion batteries to be recharged hundreds of thousands of times. Credit: Daniel A. Anderson / UCI ========================================================================================================== University of California, Irvine researchers have invented nanowire-based battery material that can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times, moving us closer to a battery that would never require replacement. The breakthrough work could lead to commercial batteries with greatly lengthened lifespans for computers, smartphones, appliances, cars and spacecraft. Scientists have long sought to use nanowires in batteries. Thousands of times thinner than a human...

Bowie Resources Partners’ purchase of Peabody Energy Corp.‘s Twentymile Mine in Routt County has fallen through, and Peabody has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. Peabody, the world’s largest privately owned producer of coal, joins other major coal companies including Arch Coal, owner of the West Elk Mine in the North Fork Valley, in going bankrupt. Arch Coal also is in Chapter 11 reorganization. Bowie, owner of the Bowie No. 2 Mine near Paonia, had agreed to buy Twentymile and two mine properties in New Mexico for $358 million. But Peabody previously had said Bowie was still trying to find...

the U.S. Supreme Court .. issued an injunction blocking the EPA from implementing its Clean Power Plan, which would end America’s use of coal, its cheapest and most abundant source of electricity. ... Western Colorado’s economy is so dependent on coal. It employs more than 2,000 people and generates $58 million in federal and state royalties, $28 million in private landowner royalties, $4.5 million in reclamation funds, and pays $28 million in property, severance, and sales taxes — all of it on the Western Slope. EPA has never tried anything so unpopular in its 45-year history, and that is saying...

Fracking accounts for close to 50 percent of all natural gas and oil production. Our production of natural gas from shale fields and tight gas has increased by 40 billion cubic feet per day since 2002. Our production of shale and tight oil from fracking has increased by 4 million barrels a day since 2002. Fracking is one of the main reasons why oil and natural gas prices are so low. That also makes it one of the main reasons why gasoline and diesel prices are so low, and electricity prices have dropped in many areas. Crude oil is the...

A new kind of fuel cell that can turn urine into electricity could revolutionize the way we produce bioenergy, particularly in developing countries. The research, published in Electrochimica Acta, describes a new design of microbial fuel cell that's smaller, cheaper and more powerful than traditional ones. The world's supply of fossil fuels is being depleted, and there is increasing pressure to develop new renewable sources of energy. Bioenergy is one such source, and microbial fuel cells can produce it. In their study, researchers from University of Bath, Queen Mary University of London and the Bristol Robotics Laboratory describe a new...

Railroads would be required to have at least two crew members aboard freight trains when they are traversing the state under a bill that won preliminary approval in the Colorado House . ... Minority Leader Brian Del Grosso, R-Loveland, took the Democrats to task over the bill, saying it is a poor way to deal with a problem he said they created. He said over the past several years, Democrats have made policy decisions that have contributed to the slowdown, and even closure of coal mines, citing the recent closure of the Bowie No. 2 mine near Paonia specifically. That...

The downward slide continued for Colorado's coal industry in 2015, highlighted by production at Routt County's Twentymile Mine, which was down 38 percent. Statewide, production in Colorado was down 18.5 percent, with 18.7 million tons, the lowest amount of coal mined in 23 years. ... Colorado Mining Association President Stuart Sanderson said the drop in production is a result of lower demand, but it was not caused by natural market forces. What we are seeing is the direct result of government regulations that are designed to drive coal out of the energy mix," Sanderson said. He called Colorado's 2010 Clean...

Across all sectors of Colorado the cost of electricity has skyrocketed more than 67 percent between 2001 and 2014, easily exceeding median income growth and the expected rate of inflation . ... For all sectors between 2001 and 2014, the cost per kilowatthour jumped from just over 6 cents to more than 10 cents, or 67.11 percent. ... the data for the remaining sectors emphasizes the double impact that increased energy costs have in the form of rapidly escalating electricity rates on Colorado ratepayers, who see not only their own personal energy costs rise, but are hit a second time...

In what would be a milestone for advanced nuclear power, China's Nuclear Engineering Construction Corporation plans to start up a high-temperature, gas-cooled pebble-bed nuclear plant next year in Shandong province, south of Beijing. The twin 105-megawatt reactors--so-called Generation IV reactors that would be immune to meltdown--would be the first of their type built at commercial scale in the world. Construction of the plant is nearly complete, and the next 18 months will be spent installing the reactor components, running tests, and loading the fuel before the reactors go critical in November 2017, said Zhang Zuoyi, director of the Institute of...

Obama on federal coal mining is a throwback to Carter administration failings. resident Obama's plot to use the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to kill federal coal mining with a thousand paper cuts is not the first time he has used NEPA to try to end energy development. Disturbingly, his scheme is a throwback to President Carter and a decade-long moratorium that ended only when President Reagan took office. Meanwhile millions of Americans, vast regions and the nation's economy will suffer. In 2009, the Obama administration settled a "sweetheart lawsuit" by environmental groups by agreeing to a NEPA study on...

In what would be a milestone for advanced nuclear power, China’s Nuclear Engineering Construction Corporation plans to start up a high-temperature, gas-cooled pebble-bed nuclear plant next year in Shandong province, south of Beijing. The twin 105-megawatt reactors—so-called Generation IV reactors that would be immune to meltdown—would be the first of their type built at commercial scale in the world.

US President Barack Obama has signed into law an initiative aimed at bringing electricity to 50 million people in sub-Saharan Africa by 2020. The Electrify Africa Act of 2015 will give legal backing to Mr Obama's flagship Power Africa scheme, which is trying to improve access to electricity through public-private partnerships. It took nearly two years to be passed in both houses of the US Congress. About two-thirds of people in Africa do not have access to reliable power....

More than 200 out of the 523 coal-fired power plants that were in operation five years ago are now closed or slated for closure. What should we do with them? The English Station coal-fired power plant sits on eight acres of land on Ball Island, a large chunk of property that nearly stretches from riverbank to riverbank in the middle of the Mill River in New Haven, Connecticut. The plant takes up pretty much the entire island, an old albatross of the industrial era surrounded by a chain link fence topped with razor wire. Though the plant stopped producing electricity...